The annual Urban Voices International Festival did not have a poetry programme this year and we did not have the annual Speak The Mind Poetry sessions either. However, poetry and spoken word maintained a strong presence in the Gauteng arts scene.

The launch of the Melville Poetry Festival was an exciting addition and the three-day event showed off a variety of voices and presentations showcasing poetry for the page and for the stage.

The Word N Sound Poetry brand, which recently celebrated its first anniversary with a live music and poetry festival, has had an impact with how it’s nurturing young and up-and-coming voices, while inviting veterans to share and inspire.

Started by poet and writer Thabiso Afurakan Mohare and his team, Word N Sound’s monthly gigs in Jozi have maintained a professional run.

The team encourages the necessary culture of reading and demands good writing from its participants. The slam contest showed that youngsters are more inclined to performance poetry, but the content is just as important as the entertainment value. And performance poetry is notably expanding in its creativity.

The Likwid Tongue collective, which includes poets Flo Mokale and Richard “Quaz” Roodt, who’ve been present since the days of The Horror Café eight years ago, inject a bit of comedy into their performances while spitting truths about their society.

Reminiscent of William Shakespeare’s joker, they sink into their alter egos as hobos and deliver their content with pathos and clowning. It’s the emotive balance of their performance that’s striking.

You then get the likes of youngster Mutle Mothibe, who is passionate about making a career solely out of performance poetry. And he pushes the boundaries, using multimedia, movement and human props to speak his mind.

He declares this in his poem Take A Stand, where he advocates the removal of the mic stand on stage as it limits his delivery. He does this as if he’s an attorney presenting his case in court, putting the audience in the middle of the action with his words. And when he calls for the evidence (what looks like a sack with something heavy in it) to be put before the judge, that opens into another poem.

“I take my artworks seriously and want them presented on stage as I’d drafted them in my head, without any half measures,” he says.

One day it won’t be a novelty to see a poetry show as a full theatrical piece. Performance poetry such as hip hop theatre and Kaleidoscope, a poetry and dance collaboration between Lebo Mashile and Sylvia Glasser of Moving Into Dance Mophatong, surely suggests as much.

Pretoria made its mark with the introduction of the Night of the Poets slot which features poetry and music shows fortnightly at the State Theatre.

But it’s the emergence of the Spoken Mind brand that came in with a different slant. It’s poetry with a social responsibility. The Spoken Mind team has held a series of poetry and music shows and in those talks sections are included, where poets are invited to indulge the audience in open conversations and one-on-one question and answer sessions. In being a medium to facilitate social change, the team works with various organisations helping with projects intended for the needy. Presently they are working with the Tshwaraganang orphanage in Hammanskraal that houses formerly abused children, by donating food, books, clothing and other necessities.

New anthologies this year include Myesha Jenkins’ Dreams of Flight and Napo Masheane’s Fat Songs For My Girlfriends. The latter was launched in a series of four shows at the Market Theatre Lab last week in an inspirational show of music and poetry dubbed Napo Masheane and the Fat Black Women Sing.

lPoetry highlights this year include the one-night showcase of the 15th Poetry Africa Festival in Joburg, featuring Shailja Patel, Kwame Dawes, Chris Abani, TJ Dema, Chiwoniso, Khadijatou Doyneh and many more. It was a night of varied poetry, paradoxes and pleasures.

lThe reappearance of Kgafela oa Magogodi on the Joburg scene was also special. He’s got a brand-new band called Marabele and they’re aiming for a sonic revolution.

In fact, poetry/spoken word-infused music is becoming more accessible and artists are getting braver and more experimental in putting it out there. It certainly has been prevalent this year. See CD reviews below:

lCape Town’s Gavin Bonner’s Of Beasts and Kings, Skins and Strings is a brave and inspired endeavour that brings storytelling and music together. It’s an acquired taste if you’re not used to the lone voice without any accompaniment on a disc. He tells his stories with interludes of music.

His live shows such as Telling Stories and Rapid Fire Fairytales (which made its debut in Joburg this year) are similar in that he tells his stories with music in-between.

But the most exciting thing about seeing him live is his improvisational skills. He asks for random words from his audience and makes up a story from them in a matter of seconds. There’s soul in his anecdotes and you find that same treatment here.

He erases the misconception that storytelling is only for children and the stories range from simple to majestic tales. The organic music feeds off from that with soulful instruments such as the viola, percussion, guitar, African mouth bow and the qanoon.

The music is arranged in a way that allows it to breathe with a sense of serenity.

This CD is available at www.gavinbonner.com

lNatalia Molebatsi, from Pretoria, is a vivacious performer and writer of a poetry anthology called Sardo Dance and the editor and compiler of another one called We Are. She stepped up to explore music and poetry with the project Natalia and the Soul Making.

She recites her poems to music produced by a band of musicians from Italy, who play around with dub, jazz, classical and African sounds.

They launched the album Soul Making in Gauteng a few months ago and it’s a combination that comes together seamlessly. At times the rhythmic nature of Natalia’s poems lends itself to rap or a melody. The content is poignant.

They’re a band to watch as they bring Africa and Europe, music and poetry together in a creative continental collaboration.

You can order the album at www.nataliamolebatsi.co.za

lKhadijatou Doyneh’s Sex Lies & History is the most musical of the three albums.

The poet has a strong singing voice and it’s interesting that she chose to recite poems instead. The poems lend themselves to the oral tradition of storytelling.

Based in the UK with African and Caribbean roots, Khadijatou is a singer/ songwriter, spoken word artist, a choreographer as well as a djembe percussionist.

All those elements come together in her live performances and she boasts African sounds blended with jazz, funk and Afro beats. The only glitch in her performance and the album is that she tends to swallow her words and needs to articulate a little clearer.

As the title suggests, her themes range from the history of her ancestors to the political implications and her own stories. She travels through Africa extensively and track six is dedicated to the late Busi Mhlongo. Get it at www.KhadijatouDoyneh.com

The average number of tracks on these albums is eight, which is just right, allowing the spoken word to sink in with the messages intact.

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